So now when you click on the Renderman (RIB) link in the features of the Rendering section, it goes directly to here. This is a first! To be on the Blender.org site is another breath of accomplishment, even though I had nothing to do with the code itself. Nonetheless I think our voice has just gotten a lot stronger. We will see what happens.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

The developers of Aqsis and MOSAIC have recently been working very hard on correctly exporting Blender fur to Renderman and the results are paying off very well. One of the major issues with Blender and Renderman is that the particle system in Blender is difficult to work with and up until recently had been impossible. Since Blender's fur system is based on particle data there was only the ability to export a general description of the fur to the RIB file but no way to actually control the fur. This makes for some ugly fur, let alone hair.

Now there is a way to export Blender fur using guide hairs! A lot of it comes from a custom DSO that handles the generation of the hairs based on the guide splines, so it's not so much a part of MOSAIC but the script does make calls to it using fragments associated with a particular shader assigned in Blender. There is also work to allow the layered shader function of Aqsis (note: Aqsis is the ONLY RiSpec renderer capable of this, not even PRMan can do this!!), so this allows for even more interesting work.

One of the projects in the works is some talk about rendering the entire Big Buck Bunny short using Aqsis as the render engine with little modification to the scenes. However that is only a rumor and not set in stone. hehe.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

This morning I was checking this out on Google, the ability to have the blog as an actual domain name, which honestly is easier to remember than the blogspot URL that has been in action for most of the year. Best part is that the blogspot URL will redirect to the .org address so there is no need to completely redo any posts or links made in the past. That is awesome!